I taught Descriptions in Year 1 in 2011 and here are some notes.
Mainly I used the PM series based around "The New Girl". Our literacy support teacher has a detailed lesson sequence that talks about the structure and grammar of The New Girl. As part of the familiarisation process, I used The New Girl as a "single text" activity, and then ran a multi-text activity where students looked at different texts. Although the PM books have other descriptions, I didn't have these readily available so I wrote some of my own for students to look at. These use some complex language so I put a strong reader into each small group.
Once a lot of modelled and shared writing is done, independent writing was done with the students writing descriptions of each other, and then some "aliens" using pictures as stimuli. Here are some of the main writing activities:
Modelled writing - writing a description of our school, and several other familiar topics.
Shared writing - writing a description of our principal
Independent writing - draw a student name out of a hat and write a description of them
Independent writing - draw a portrait of another student then write a description of them
Independent writing - pick an alien picture card then write a description of the alien
We also did a lot of deconstruction of the text, mainly of The New Girl, looking particularly at adjectives and nouns, including proper nouns and pronouns. Once the students had written some of their own descriptions, we looked at adjectives and nouns in their writing. Most of this was done on the smartboard or an A3 enlargement of the text, underlining these items in a consistent colour.
As part of this process, I ran a Word Cline activity to build their vocabulary, although I did not focus the content of the word cline on a specific description, because I wanted to build off some work we had done previously and introduce the word cline concept.
Mainly I used the PM series based around "The New Girl". Our literacy support teacher has a detailed lesson sequence that talks about the structure and grammar of The New Girl. As part of the familiarisation process, I used The New Girl as a "single text" activity, and then ran a multi-text activity where students looked at different texts. Although the PM books have other descriptions, I didn't have these readily available so I wrote some of my own for students to look at. These use some complex language so I put a strong reader into each small group.
Some descriptions to use as examples
Once a lot of modelled and shared writing is done, independent writing was done with the students writing descriptions of each other, and then some "aliens" using pictures as stimuli. Here are some of the main writing activities:
We also did a lot of deconstruction of the text, mainly of The New Girl, looking particularly at adjectives and nouns, including proper nouns and pronouns. Once the students had written some of their own descriptions, we looked at adjectives and nouns in their writing. Most of this was done on the smartboard or an A3 enlargement of the text, underlining these items in a consistent colour.
As part of this process, I ran a Word Cline activity to build their vocabulary, although I did not focus the content of the word cline on a specific description, because I wanted to build off some work we had done previously and introduce the word cline concept.